The New York Times had a piece on plans by several leading Democrats to develop a “Project 2029” policy agenda. The point was to pick up on the Republicans’ apparent success with their Project 2025 Agenda. 

Stealing the title from a right-wing think tank’s policy book as a path back to political power makes about as much sense as buying the same socks as LeBron James as a path to basketball stardom. But no one ever accused the Democrats of being great thinkers.

It’s not clear what part of this plan is most bizarre. After losing twice to the most unpopular president of the last century, the Democrats clearly do have a problem reaching voters. But Trump actually spent the 2024 campaign hiding from Project 2025. He insisted he didn’t know anything about Project 2025 or the people putting it together. 

Trump was lying of course, but it’s clear he didn’t see the volume or its specific content as winning electoral issues. Are these Democrats expecting to create a set of policies that the 2028 nominee will deny knowing anything about?

There is a question of what policies the Democrats can push that connect with voters, but that one doesn’t seem all that hard. Polls consistently show that voters feel they are being screwed, as the rich get a disproportionate share of income and a hugely disproportionate share of power. 

Programs that benefit the bulk of the population — like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — enjoy massive public support in virtually every poll conducted. Supporting and expanding these programs seems like a great place to start a winning presidential campaign.

In the case of Social Security, a modest increase in benefits can make a big difference in millions of people’s lives. Trump apparently had a winning issue in saying that he would make Social Security benefits tax free. Since most retirees already pay little or no tax on their Social Security benefits, this was a policy that primarily benefited higher income people who don’t need it. The Democrats can easily turn this on its head by proposing to increase benefits in a way that phases out for higher income people. 

In the case of Medicare and Medicaid, both programs can be improved and costs reduced if the Democrats are prepared to step on the toes of some of their rich backers. Medicare has been shafted to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade by overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage.       

The Democrats can look to make the traditional Medicare program better and to downsize and eventually eliminate the more costly Medicare Advantage plans. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that all those ads and huge salaries for insurance executives, as well as profits for shareholders, cost money. 

There has been a bipartisan effort over the last three decades to force people into Medicare Advantage by making traditional Medicare worse. The simplest and cheapest change would be to simply put in a cap on out-of-pocket spending for traditional Medicare, as is already the case for Medicare Advantage. We also need to cover dental, vision, and hearing. These were all reasonably cheap when the program was established in 1965. That isn’t quite the story anymore.

The Democrats can also look to get drug prices down. President Biden started to do this with the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided for negotiating Medicare prices for important drugs. Trump is nixing this, but the Democrats need to pick it up the effort and go much further.

While the Democrats accept the rhetoric that Democrats like government and Republicans don’t, it is a stupid lie that hugely benefits Republicans. Drugs are expensive because the government gives drug companies patent monopolies. We will spend over $700 billion this year on prescription drugs and other pharmaceutical products. In the absence of government-granted patent monopolies, we would likely spend close to $100 billion. The difference of $600 billion comes to $4,000 for every household. In other words, real money.

It’s true that the high prices are used to finance drug development, but there are alternatives to patent monopolies for supporting research, such as paying people. We used to do this to the tune of more than $50 billion a year through the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies, until Elon Musk chainsawed them. But we can turn this around and radically increase funding with a focus not only on basic research but developing and testing new drugs. 

Put that in your Project 2029. All new drugs could then be sold as cheap generics. That would go a good part of the way towards making universal Medicare cheap and affordable.

There are other items that we know poll off the charts which should be on the agenda of a Democrat who wants to win in 2028. A higher minimum wage regularly draws huge support even among Republicans. Initiatives have been approved even in very red states like Arkansas. The minimum wage would be over $26 an hour today if it had kept pace with productivity growth since 1968, as it had from its creation in 1938 to 1968. A target of $!8 an hour seems very modest.  

It would also be great if Democrats could again be the antiwar party. Donald Trump and his gang of merry defense contractors want to keep upping spending on exotic weapon systems to look tough and put taxpayer money in their pockets. The Democrats can turn this around, most importantly by saying no to a New Cold War with China. 

China is a country that already has an economy that is 30 percent larger than the US economy and growing more rapidly. We could reasonably talk about spending the Soviet Union into the ground, an economy which at its peak was a bit more than half the size of the US economy. In an arms race with China, it is the United States economy that goes into the ground. Trumpian ignorance on the relative size and strength of the two economies is not an asset here.

We can have enormous benefits from closer cooperation with China in many areas, encouraging open-source research wherever feasible. Healthcare and the environment are two obvious categories. We can make much more progress in the former working together. In the latter case, China is hugely ahead of the US with high quality, low-cost EVs that already have more than half the Chinese market. 

Pushing ahead with a green conversion should be very popular. Trump might want us choking in fumes in a burning planet, but less smog and preserving the planet for our kids should be popular for anyone not looking to move to Mars.

The Democrats could look to take a progressive route, but it would piss off some of their big funders who make money on things like ripping people off with Medicare Advantage or crypto sleaze. That is the fundamental problem that calling a program “Project 2029” cannot fix. 

Clearly a populist agenda focused on real benefits to ordinary working people can win elections, as Zohran Mamdani showed in the New York Democratic mayoral primary. But winning national elections is very different than winning a primary in a very Democratic city.

It is a safe bet that massive money will be on the other side of any Democrat pushing this sort of populist platform. The media can also be expected to firmly take the other side as they did in 2024. Harris’s statements and proposals were subjected to serious scrutiny, whereas the utter nonsense that Trump spewed (he’ll get prices down on day one, he’ll end the war in Ukraine on day one) were treated as just Trump being Trump. And the media created a false narrative where everyone was suffering from the Biden economy even as most data showed we had the best economy for ordinary workers in half a century. 

For some bizarre reason, progressives all recognize that campaign spending can rig an election for the rich, but don’t seem to believe that who owns the media also skews elections. Somehow, they seem to believe that ads influence votes, but the material people see between the ads doesn’t. That’s hard to understand.

I don’t know if a Democrat running on a populist platform in 2028 can overcome the real obstacles that big money creates. But it is important to have a clear view of the issues and the obstacles. Somehow, I don’t think that Project 2029 will give us that.